


an inconvenient time of day

by tielan



Series: sharp Evening stars and bright Morning flame [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Sedoretu, Amnesia, Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Captain America: The Winter Soldier, F/M, Past Relationship(s), Sedoretu, Spies and Secret Agents, relationship, the Morning marriage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-28
Updated: 2016-05-28
Packaged: 2018-07-10 16:58:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6996778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tielan/pseuds/tielan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Tell me you at least remember this,</i> she says in Vienna, and receives no answer that could ever satisfy her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	an inconvenient time of day

**Author's Note:**

> This is the story of the _[sedoretu](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Sedoretu)_ marriage between Bucky Barnes | Natasha Romanoff | Maria Hill | Steve Rogers.

**The Morning Marriage**

 

What does it mean to be Morning? To the only child who will survive the training of the Red Room, it means being different from the others.

 _It was unwise to take a moiety girl,_ say the trainers at first, shaking their heads in dismay. Then, when the girl proves herself a fast learner with a sure foot and a cunning grace, they change their tune. _Who would look for a spy with moiety?_

She is Morning until she is sixteen. Then the treatments start.

There are voices in her ear and in her head; hands positioning her body, hands on her skin. She is who and what they need to be, every woman to ever exist and no woman at all but a construct of femininity that will slip beneath their defences and cut them to the bone. She is fluid, graceful as water, ubiquitous as air, to be what is needed in the moment, to achieve the goal.

She is Morning. She is Evening. She has no moiety.

Moiety is nothing – neither trait nor characteristic – a mere identity cluster with only the social meaning assigned it in a cultural framework.

* * *

There is a man, Yakov, dark and intense, and burdened by a history he doesn’t know. They work together – in Athens, in Lesotho, in Vladivostok, in DC. They barely speak; she because she has no instruction to make conversation, he because he has no memories of which to speak.

Blood is blood, it spills from a hole in the chest and washes in clouds from her dress in the bathtub of the dingy apartment out of which they are working in Berlin.

He’s cooking _ciorbă de varză_ when she emerges, hanging her dress up in the window to dry, amidst the other laundry they did earlier that day. Then she sits at the wooden table with the wobbling leg, and reaches for the Makarov that jammed earlier today – the reason she went for the knife.

Under her hands, the weapon comes apart, the pieces laid out on the maps spread out across the table, like the pieces of him, of her, taken apart and put together however is needed – as they are needed on this mission, and so are sitting in an apartment over dinner after the day’s work done.

The thought burns within her, an abrupt and sudden light of understanding; this is... _domestic_.

Her hands pause at their work as she looks at him. She has no benchmark by which to define this, and yet—

 _Evening,_ she thinks as he spoons soup into bowls, the silver of his hand and arm gleaming like the last glimmer of day as shadows fall across the world, _Evening_.

He turns towards her and their eyes meet beneath the glow of the light over the dining table.

* * *

Her hands still as she cleans the gun and he turns to see why.

He rarely works with partners, but they mesh well without words, without thought. An extension of himself, like the arm, but with a will of her own in the crisp competence of her actions, in the blue, blue eyes—

 _Morning,_ he thinks as and suddenly she’s bigger, broader, blonder, male—

Pain splinters through him, stabbing into his head, into his chest. His hand clenches on the bowl as he grabs for the benchtop, cracking ceramic, spilling soup, warping wood. He doesn’t realise he’s clenching the spoon in his fist until a hand closes over his, prying the metal from his grip in a way that he should read as a threat, but doesn’t.

Her hands frame his face, blue eyes to grey, and his training says he should twist her arms behind her back, but something deeper and older clings to his soul and says, _Always treat a lady with respect, son, no matter who you think she is._

He looks down into the short swing of red hair cropped to the jaw and her lips are parted—

— _she is trained to seduce men—_

— _you assume he is still a man—_

The ghosts of his past whisper through his head as he covers her mouth with his, as he slides an arm around her waist, as he pushes her up against the bench and lets her hands slide around his hips to rest in the small of his back, caressing. He has no name and neither does she, the names they were given mean nothing to who they are.

This is not his mission, nor is it hers. Perhaps that is why they do it – a little kernel of _we are people_ deep within the core of them. It is a risk, and one they will pay for later. And they are trained to evaluate risk, but they do not evaluate this.

They couple in the musty bed with little gentleness but something that is rather more binding for such as they: trust.

Later, he will cling to the memory of her palm pressed warmly over his heart in the harsh rasp of the aftermath, even as they scrub the mission from his recollection.

* * *

They meet three times more before Steve Rogers awakens and throws everything awry: twice as partners – in Lithuania and Somalia – and once as enemies in the Middle East.

Does she remember him before S.H.I.E.L.D pulls her apart one final time so she can refit the pieces as best she can match them? Maybe. Female biochemistry is more wayward than the male, and even sterilisation cannot fully erase the ebb and flow of the hormones attuned to the _menses_.

Yet in the cacophony of her splintered parts, Natasha Romanoff can’t distinguish one memory from the others, can’t remember more than the vaguest of dreams. A table and a lamp, a gun in pieces on a map, plain linen under her spine, warm metal gripping her right hip.

It’s not until DC – after they find out who the Winter Soldier truly is, after she grapples with him, hand to hand – that she recalls another grappling, heart to heart, and is nauseous for more than just the bullet wound.

Such as he is, she once was, too.

There but for the grace of S.H.I.E.L.D goes she.

* * *

After S.H.I.E.L.D goes down, she hunts up the reports, using the fragile fragments of her memories. Those she hands to Steve, while she goes looking for answers and finds only empty rooms, full of dust, without even the trace of memories.

It’s not until Wanda shoves open the door that she truly starts remembering the parts the Red Room locked away.

_...a fight, intense and edged, cold light pouring in the windows. **Morning** , she thinks as the sunlight flashes in her eyes, off her hair. **Evening** , she thinks as it gleams in his gaze, off his arm..._

_...a shower curtain underneath them, torn from its moorings as he stumbled and grabbed for something that wasn’t her. They rutted amidst pouring water, her training in pleasure forgotten, his training in death leaving bruises on her hips while his mouth left marks on her throat..._

_...she hauls on the motorcycle – the make is ancient Army – but it’s reliable, and she knows how to jump-start it – and finds him staring, oddly entranced by the machine..._

But the Winter Soldier is a ghost, and he stays in the wind and out of the limelight; while the Black Widow is an Avenger, and learns to live in the public eye.

At least she has the fragments of herself, the last half-dozen years, the certainty that she can be whoever she chooses. As it turns out, Bucky – Yakov, Illyan, Sasha, James, whoever he is or has been – doesn’t. Not with codes in his head, not with compliance forced upon him, and most certainly not with the Accords bombing on his account.

 _Tell me you at least remember this,_ she says in Vienna, and receives no answer that could ever satisfy her.

 

“ _Morning is wonderful. Its only drawback is that it comes at such an inconvenient time of day._ ”  
― Glen Cook, Sweet Silver Blues


End file.
